(_Fam._, XXIV, 4)
I fear that my last letter has offended thee; for thou thyself art
wont to designate as just the adage of thy friend in his Andria,[12]
“Homage begets friends; truth, enemies.” If my fear prove true, then
accept what may in some degree soothe thy injured feelings. Let not
the truth be a source of ill humor in every and all instances, I beg
of thee. Men, I know, are wont to be angered at justifiable censure,
and to rejoice in merited praise. Thou, indeed, O Cicero (speaking
with thy leave), didst live as a man, didst speak as an orator, didst
write as a philosopher. It was thy life that I found fault with, not
thy intellectual powers, nor yet thy command of language. Indeed, I
admire the former, and am amazed at the latter. And, moreover, in thy
life I feel the lack of nothing except the element of constancy, and
a desire for peace that was to have been expected of a philosopher.
I look in vain for a deep-rooted antipathy to civil dissensions,
to strifes utterly of no avail, considering that liberty had been
crushed and that the Republic had already been mourned as dead.
Mark how different is my attitude toward thee from thine toward
Epicurus on so many occasions, but especially in the _De finibus_.
Whenever thou wert so inclined, thou didst praise his life and
ridicule his intellect.[13] In thee I ridicule nothing. I take
compassion, however, on the life thou didst lead; while, as I have
already stated, I rejoice in thy mental abilities and in thy powers
of expression. O thou great father of Roman eloquence![14] Not only
I, but all who take delight in the elegance of the Latin tongue
render thee great thanks. Thou art the fountain-head from which we
draw the vivifying waters for our meadows. We frankly confess that
we have been guided by thee, assisted by thy judgments, enlightened
by thy radiance; and, finally, that it was under thy auspices, so to
speak, that I have gained this ability as a writer (such as it is),
and that I have attained my purpose.
For the realms of poetry, however, there was at hand a second guide.
The nature of the case demanded that there should be two leaders--one
whom I might follow in the unencumbered ways of prose, and the other
in the more restricted paths of poetry. It was necessary that there
should be two men whom I should admire, respectively, for their
eloquence and their song. This had needs be so. For--and I beg
the kind indulgence of you both for speaking thus boldly--neither
of you could serve both purposes; he could not rival thee in thy
chosen field, whereas thou couldst not adapt thyself to his measured
flow. I would not, indeed, have ventured to be the first to pass
such criticism, even though I clearly perceived it to be true. It
has already been passed before me--or, peradventure, it may have
been quoted from another writer--by that great Annaeus Seneca of
Cordova,[15] who, as he himself complains, was prevented from
becoming acquainted with thee, not by any lapse of years, but by the
fury of civil warfare.[16] He might have seen thee, but did not;
withal, he was a constant admirer and worshiper both of thy works and
of those of that other. Seneca, therefore, marks out the boundaries
of your respective spheres, and enjoins upon each to yield to his
coworker in the other field.
But I am keeping thee in suspense too long. Dost thou ask who that
other guide is? Thou wilt know the man at once, if thou art merely
reminded of his name. It is Publius Vergilius Maro, a citizen of
Mantua, of whom thou didst prophesy such great things. For we have
read that when thou, then advanced in years, hadst admired some
youthful effort of his, thou didst inquire its author’s name, and
that, having seen the young man, thou didst express thy great
delight. And then, drawing on thy unexhausted fount of eloquence,
thou didst pronounce upon him a judgment which, though mingled with
self-praise, was nevertheless both honorable and splendid for him:
“Rome’s other hope and stay.”[17] This sentence, which he thus heard
fall from thy lips, pleased the youth to such a degree, and was so
jealously treasured in his mind, that twenty years later, when thou
hadst long since ended this earthly career, he inserted it word for
word into his divine poem. And if it had been thy lot to see this
work, thou wouldst have rejoiced that from the first blossom thou
hadst made such accurate prediction of future success. Thou wouldst,
moreover, have congratulated the Latin Muses, either for leaving
but a doubtful superiority to the arrogant Greek Muses, or else for
winning over them a decisive victory. There are defenders for both
these opinions, I grant thee. And yet, if I have come to know thee
from thy works--and I feel that I know thee as intimately as if I
had always lived with thee--I should say that thou wouldst have been
a stern defender of the latter view, and that, just as thou hadst
already granted to Latium the palm in oratory,[18] thou wouldst
have done likewise in the case of poetry. I do not doubt, moreover,
that thou wouldst have pronounced the _Aeneid_ superior to the
_Iliad_--an assertion which Propertius did not fear to make from the
very beginning of Vergil’s labors. For when he had meditated upon the
opening lines of the inspired poem, he freely gave utterance to the
feelings and hopes aroused by it in these verses:
Yield then, ye bards of Greece, ye Romans yield,
A mightier yet than Homer takes the field.[19]
Thus much concerning my second guide for Latin eloquence, thus much
concerning Rome’s other hope and stay. I come back to thee now. Thou
hast already heard from me my opinions on thy life and on thy genius.
Art thou desirous now of learning what lot befell thy works, of
knowing in what esteem they are held either by the world in general,
or else by the more learned classes? There are extant, indeed,
splendid volumes--volumes which I can scarcely enumerate, much less
peruse with care. The fame of thy deeds and thy works is very great,
and has spread far and wide. Thy name, too, has a familiar ring to
all. Very few and rare, however, are those who study thee, and for
various reasons: either because of the natural perversity of the
times toward such studies, or because the minds of men have become
dull and sluggish, or, as I think most likely, because greed has bent
their minds in an entirely different direction. Wherefore, some of
thy works have (unless I am mistaken) perished in this generation,
and I know not whether they will ever be recovered. Oh, how great is
my grief thereat; how great is the ignominy of this age; how great
the loss to posterity! It was not, I suppose, sufficiently degrading
to neglect our own powers, and to bequeath to future generations
no fruit of our intellects; but, worse than all else, we had to
destroy the fruit also of thy labor with our cruel, our unpardonable
disregard. This lamentable loss has overtaken not merely thy works,
but also those of many other illustrious authors. But at present I
would speak of thy writings only; and the names of those whose loss
is the more regrettable are the following: _De republica_, _De
re familiari_, _De re militari_, _De laude philosophiae_,[20] _De
consolatione_, and the _De gloria_.[21] Concerning the last, however,
I entertain a more or less doubtful hope of its recovery, and
consequently my despair is not unqualified. Unfortunately, however,
even of those books that have come down to us, there are lacking
large portions. It is as if we had overcome, after a great struggle,
the oblivion threatened by the sloth and inactivity of ages; but,
as the price of victory, we had to mourn over our leaders, not only
those to be numbered among the dead, but also the maimed and the
lost. We miss this loss in many of thy works, but more especially in
the _De oratore_,[22] the _Academica_, and the _De legibus_--all of
which have reached us in such a fragmentary and mutilated condition
that it would have been better, perhaps, had they perished altogether.
There remains still another topic. Art thou desirous of learning the
present condition of Rome and of the Roman state? of knowing the
actual appearance of thy fatherland, the state of harmony among its
citizens, to whom the shaping of its policies has fallen, and by
whose wisdom and by whose hands the reins of government are held?
Art thou wondering whether or not the Danube, and the Ganges, and
the Ebro, and the Nile, and the Don are still the boundaries of our
empire? and whether that man has arisen among us
The limits of whose victories
Are ocean, of his fame the skies,
and who
O’er Ind and Garamant extreme
Shall stretch his reign,
as thy Mantuan friend once sang?[23] I feel sure that thou art most
eager to hear such and similar tidings, owing to thy loyalty and the
love thou didst bear the fatherland, a love remaining constant even
unto death. But it is better to pass over such subjects in silence.
Believe me, Cicero, if thou wert to learn of the fallen state of our
country, thou wouldst weep bitter tears, be it a region of Heaven
that thou inhabitest, or of Hades. Forever farewell.
_From the land of the living, on the left bank of the Rhone,
in Transpadane Gaul, in the same year, on the fourteenth day
before the Kalends of January (at Avignon, December 19, 1345)._